Posted in: Uncategorized

Is Outlook finally looking over its shoulder?

I am (obviously) very interested in the email space and have been tracking two parallel announcements that make me believe that Microsoft might be worried about the future of Outlook as the dominant mail client for enterprise use. First, a recent article on Microsoft’s private testing of Outlook Live as a way to bring a new set of users to its service and the increased progress that the Mozilla Calendar project leads me to believe that competition for the corporate and home “power user” is about to get more intense.

Posted in: Business

Tivo CEO Politics: My Way or Highway

I found this article while browsing for interesting commentary on the management transition on Tivo (thanks to PaidContent for the pointer). The article basically talks about the division between the Board and CEO regarding the direction of TiVo. I am a TiVo customer and fan and must say that I find the outgoing CEO’s logic to be the more compelling case.

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XenSource — Open Source Continues its Steady March

I was reading about how XenSource (http://www.xensource.com/) recently closed their Series A round of VC funding to develop open source virtualization software. With almost every layer of the stack being virtualized, this is not necessarily a surprising announcement. However, what is interesting is the speed with which profitable sectors of software seem to be getting […]

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Yet Another Set of Predictions for 2005

Everyone I know is making predictions for 2005. I figured I might as well do the same. Here goes (read the full post if you want the whole story):

1. Mobile payments become big
2. Home networking stands still
3. Web 2.0 becomes a dirty word
4. Open source is the only big story in enterprise software
5. People figure out blogging

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Shameless Plug for an Event I am Organizing

I am the Event Chair for the upcoming MIT/Stanford VLAB Event on open source software development. It should be a good event with some great speakers. The event will focus on the challenges associated with building a great OSS development organization and will feature participation from JBoss, Mozilla, Apache, Sourceforge, and others. If you are […]

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Friendvertising

I really like using new software applications that make my life better. Unfortunately, a lot of these applications have some network effects characteristics that only make them really useful if a lot of my friends also adopt them (Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Skype/IM come to mind). Most of these companies rely on some form of user-generated push to help get the word out, attract users, and keep marketing costs down. Most importantly, your average user is more likely to respond to an invitation from a friend than they are from an anonymous service. The challenge that I am finding as a “friendvertiser” (one who introduces or otherwise advertises new products to his or her friends) is determining the subset of my contacts to invite to any new service.

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Are We Asking Too Much of Email?

I have been thinking a lot about user interfaces lately and I am beginning to wonder if we are asking too much of the email inbox these days. Gone are the days where I only used my email inbox for sending and receiving messages and the occasional attachment. My inbox is the primary method through which I receive email (obviously), but it is also the major conduit through which friends share pictures, I stay on top of the world via RSS, and keep the bulk of files that I need.

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